@amerika @FranciscoScaramanga @GummyNerds @eriner @sun

> Also, the cause of the end of Neanderthals was not cannibalism, but outbreeding.

It's not cannibalism if they're a different species.

At any rate, we did eat them, and I didn't ask why they died out but why we ate them. We've got knife-scored Neanderthal bones, apparently we ate them.

The reason we ate them is that we could, and the reason we could was that we could build a city and they could not. What we know of them indicates that they were probably smarter and stronger than us, but they stuck to small packs of one or two families and we built cities. If there was a clash and they lost one adult male, they were down an adult male when there was another clash, but if you've got a town full of people and you lose one man, you can find another guy to replace him. So the newer the Neanderthal skeleton, the more fractured skulls we find, things like badly set broken arms: they didn't have societies so they didn't specialize so they didn't advance.

> Modern humans were simply more numerous, and overwhelmed the Neanderthals

There were just so many humans that suddenly there were no Neanderthals. "Oh, look at *all* those modern humans! Oh, my Neanderthal heart! I'm coming, Elizabeth!"